Birders flocked to get good views of rare ducks on Lake Champlain last year. Photo: Larry Master

Public radio: it’s your go-to source for important, hard-hitting topics so often ignored by main-stream media. Such as the annual Christmas Bird Count, a popular event in environmental circles in the U.S. and Canada, as shown by this map of counting efforts.

Unchanged since 1948, that 25-km circle takes in parts of Wolfe Island and stretches through the army base, Kingston Mills and Collins Bay. The area provides a good representation of both land birds and water fowl.

The conditions were “tough,” said Ron Weir, honorary president of the Kingston Field Naturalists, who sponsored the local count.

“We did the best we could in the situation,” he said. “It was really, really cold and the wind was blowing and the snow was flying.”

While many of the counts have already finished, the span for this year’s count runs from Dec 14 through Jan 5th. The year-after-year contribution by citizen scientists supplies valuable information about what’s happening for birds and their natural ranges in these changing times.

If you participated in one of this winter’s bird counts, please feel free to share comments about how that went.